Oh, where to begin. The ICE raids in Ventura and Carpinteria have added tremendously to the heartbreak and anxiety I have been feeling since Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Iniquities began. My parents grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland for the six years of WWII. I grew up with their stories.
The parallel between this dystopian iteration of the Republican Party with the National Socialists during the time leading up to WWII, is frighteningly similar. Holland fell early in the war of agression, and the Gestapo moved in to conduct searches of houses as they looked for Jews and radios. They wanted to incarcerate/eliminate the Jews, and they wanted to control the flow of information and keep people afraid and unsettled. No freedom of the press; no public media.
My uncle spent the war in a German forced labor camp. He was arrested/captured while walking to the store one day. With German men fighting the war, Germany needed workers to maintain their infrastructure. No one in the family knew where he was until several months later a letter from him arrived. He later revealed he had been beaten when he complained about the lack of food. Had he been Jewish, he would have been sent to Auschwitz.
My father went into hiding. He couldn’t walk on the streets in the daytime. Twice the Germans came to search his mother’s house. Twice he hid in the crawl space between their apartment and the apartment below as the footsteps of the Gestapo stomped above his nose. During the daytime, he often hid in the hayloft of my grandfather’s grocery business (and studied his engineering books by the light from a tiny window in the loft).
Several years after the war, he was recruited by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to come to the United States. Five years from the date of their arrival, my parents took the citizenship test and became grateful American citizens, exchanging the Red, White, and Blue–striped flag of the Netherlands for a Red, White, and Blue–striped flag with 48 stars.
The leadership of the Republican Party has co-opted the flag of the United States as being exclusively theirs. That grand array of flags in their photo ops does not, however, signify the rightness of their vision, their actions, nor their depraved indifference to the welfare of “others.” The flag belongs to all people who believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It belongs to all people who believe in the rule of law, and in liberty and justice for all, and who are willing to speak out on their behalf, flag in hand.
